Frozen Four preview: Penn State looking to continue magical run vs. Boston University

The fifth-place team in the second-best conference in the country doesn't usually make it this far, but Penn State's season has been all about defying expectations.

The Nittany Lions were picked to finish sixth in the Big Ten's preseason poll, a mark they beat, and as recently as the 21st of their 39 games, they were a sub-.500 team. But since they pulled to an even record on Jan. 18, at which point they were just 28th in the Pairwise, they've gone electric. A 12-3-2 record, outscoring opponents 69-52, and with only one loss in nine games against NCAA tournament teams.

This is only Penn State's 13th year as a Div. 1 program since being revived in 2012 (they were briefly a Div. 1 team in the 1940s, and played a whopping 25 games over five seasons, so that basically didn't happen). Under coach Guy Gadowsky, they've made four of the last eight NCAA tournaments, but this is their first-ever Frozen Four.

Boston University had a few years in the wilderness there. Not that they were ever truly bad, or anything approaching it, but they also weren't what you think about when you think about the BU teams of the post-Jack Parker era. From 2019 to 2022, COVID was certainly a factor, but far from the only reason the Terriers only won nine more games than they lost, and made the NCAA tournament just one time in three tries.

Since Jay Pandolfo took over, though, it's been near-unprecedented success. A record of 80-34-4 (.694 winning percentage) and now three straight trips to the Frozen Four.

But they, too, know something about stark turnarounds and basically playing two seasons in one. They famously spent most of the season with mediocre-to-poor goaltending that rarely stole games for them, and then did a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency with a USHL netminder who buoyed their campaign from late January to present.

So, in a lot of ways, you can really judge this game based on the last 40 percent of the season, give or take. Not that you should. Maybe not that it matters.

There's only one way to find out.

Let’s get into the matchups:

No. 7 Boston University Terriers (23-13-2) vs. No. 13 Penn State University Nittany Lions (22-13-5)

Not that I'm gonna do it below, because I think it's needlessly reductive, but I do wanna break out some "since the vibe shift" stats for both teams here, just for fun and maybe it'll be a little instructive at the end.

It's interesting, to me at least, that Penn State wasn't as bad as the record suggested in the first half, and hasn't done much to improve their underlying numbers in the second. For BU, it's kinda the same story.

What they also had in common was that the goaltending took off. For Penn State, you can't even really all-the-way see why. Same guy was their starter, he just got on a heater. For BU, the answer is obvious: They started giving a different goalie all the starts, and he played significantly better. Neither team saw much change in its shooting luck, but the difference between shooting 10 and 11 percent is enough to win you a few extra games, for sure.

If your team can swing its goal differential by plus-1.2 or so per game, you're gonna turn your wins into blowouts and your close losses to wins or ties pretty consistently.

But there is, as you might imagine, more to it than that.

The storyline

Unlike the other semifinal at the Frozen Four, these teams did not meet in the regular season and had relatively few common opponents, so there's not a lot to draw from there — except to say PSU just dispatched two Hockey East teams that gave BU big problems this year. But also, again, you can kinda-sorta throw out the first 20ish games of the season for both of them.

So, the question is which team can keep the goaltending hot, run the offense through its top players, and generally establish control of the game in a way that neither did consistently in the regular season.

These are both talented rosters, though in terms of depth you'd have to give the edge to BU and its 14 drafted players as well as a handful of high-scoring undrafted free agents. And no doubt, the experience at this stage of the season will be a benefit as well. But will we once again see the Terriers' tendency to take nights off at inopportune times? It reared its head as recently as the Hockey East semifinals, when they were beaten soundly by UConn… the same team Penn State just snuck past to get to the Frozen Four.

Only one way to find out. 

The potential matchups

Below are the season-long stats (via InStat) for the lines used in both teams’ most recent games. Let's start with higher-seeded BU. Stats are in all situations:

I would defy you to find a top line with as much oomph as what BU's is bringing to the table here: While it's only about 200 minutes together, and a lot of that on the power play, it's hard to argue with 80 percent of the shots and 9.4 goals per hour. That on-ice save percentage is something you can probably ignore, except that they scored 82 percent of the goals despite getting .877 goaltending behind them. Shane Lachance, Ryan Greene, and Quinn Hutson combined for 47 of BU's 145 goals, and the diversity of their play styles helped make the Terrier power play incredibly potent, clicking at 28.4 percent for the season, good for fourth in the nation.

(And that power-play thing is important because few teams put their opponents on more man advantages this season than Penn State. They conceded 135 power plays and allowed goals on more than 20 percent of them, but again: first half/second half, maybe. Not that you'd want to take your chances against BU either way.)

Their second line has Cole Eiserman on it, and he has the team's co-lead in goals at 23. He's been skating with Kamil Bednarik and Devin Kaplan lately, and while those two guys combined for just 12 goals (of which 10 were Kaplan's), everyone who's played with Eiserman this season mostly has one job: Get him the puck and let him shoot it.

As you might imagine, there's line-juggling involved because of that aforementioned predisposition toward taking a night off or expecting goals to come easy, so if Pandolfo moves things around up front again on Thursday, that wouldn't be a surprise.

It would be a surprise to see a shake-up on the back end. Most of these pairings have been together for quite a while, and they offer some very different looks to opponents. Cole Hutson is the best freshman in the country this year, and probably a top-three or four defender overall, and he has the green light to freelance a bit in transition and attack specifically because Gavin McCarthy is so good in his own end. Hutson doesn't exactly gamble because he wins far more often than the house does, but McCarthy is there to clean up any turnovers.

Tom Willander and draft-eligible Sascha Boumedienne, who's been 18 for less than three months, make up a second pair that most teams would be happy to have as their top duo. They can just kinda do it all very responsibly, and that's a big reason BU outscores opponents 2-to-1 when they're out there. The bottom pair is little-used, and the numbers kinda reflect why. You'd just rather have the top two out there instead unless you absolutely can't.

Let's move on to Penn State, based on what they rolled out against UConn:

There's one real focal point for the Penn State offense: right wing Aiden Fink. He has a point on 53 of the Nittany Lions' 138 (almost 40 percent). His current linemates, Danny Dzhaniyev and Reese Laubach, chipped in an additional 27 goals, so it's not like they're slouches, but there's 21 between himself and Dzhaniyev. Of course, teams would have focused on shutting Fink down all year, but he's been held off the scoresheet just seven times this season.

Perhaps the more balanced line is that of Matt DiMarsico (17 goals), Charlie Cerrato (15), and JJ Wiebusch (14). It's not that just that the sophomore and two freshmen were all scoring threats, it's that they got hot at the right time; they had five of Penn State's eight goals in the regional. They've played together the most of any line on the tema, and boy does it show.

The guy who had the other three? That's Dane Dowiak, who's kind of a do-it-all guy for the Nittany Lions and had 12 goals this season despite averaging just 16:27 per game. However, the results for the depth lines are, as you can see, not very good. They gave bigger contributions earlier in the tournament, but they can't be passengers on Thursday, at all.

On the blue line, it's kind of a Denver-y situation for PSU, where they have one established pairing and then two that have relatively few minutes together. Here, too, a heavily used defender — in this case it's Carter Schade — got injured in late March and is done for the year. Schade was in almost every game, averaging almost 19 minutes a night, before his injury, which happened in practice. As such, while they can count on Cade Christenson and Simon Mack for some very steady defending, the numbers suggest everything else might be up in the air in terms of what Gadowsky decides to do with Jimmy Dowd, Jarod Crespo, Nick Fascia, and Casey Aman. The guy with the most minutes of those players is Aman, and he averages just 17:26 per appearance, so whatever they take on Thursday could be a big ask.

The goalie duel

Arsenii Sergeev has a track record over three years of college hockey — his first two at UConn, and then this year — that suggests he's probably a .915-.920ish goaltender, and that's enough to win you a lot of games. He's quite good and stopped 68 of 71 in the Allentown regional, and anything even approaching that level of performance will win him this game pretty easily.

And the good news is, he doesn't tend to have a ton of off nights. But when he does, it can get ugly. You don't, at this point in the season, want to count on your team to bail you out, especially against BU.

Perhaps more problematic is that Sergeev tends to face more high-danger chances, and more shots in general, than any other netminder in the Frozen Four — and since they started winning consistently back in mid-January, they're actually giving up almost four expected goals per game. That won't fly against a team with the finishers on the Terrier roster, unless Sergeev stands on his head. Which he could.

For BU, there was clearly a need to tighten things up in front of the goalie and they've largely done that for Mikhail Yegorov, who hasn't exactly needed the help. Almost 13 goals saved above expected in just 16 appearances tells the story as effectively as his .931 save percentage. Penn State is just dealing with an elite goaltender who, if he'd done this for the full season instead of starting the year in the USHL, would be in the Mike Richter conversation.

Yegorov has three relatively poor games on his short resume as well, so it's obvious that talented teams — which Penn State certainly is — can get to him early and often. But more often, he's shut the door on elite teams; he played NCAA tournament teams in 10 of his 16 appearances, and his save percentage in those games is .932. Can't really do better than that.

So the Terriers have every reason to place a lot of confidence in Yegorov, but we're talking about one game and he has mixed in a rough outing before.

You'd probably give the Terriers the edge overall, but people counted out both these teams before, and look where they ended up.